The Leader

Courtesy nyc.gov

A person is born every 11 seconds. In our American society there is a melting pot of people. More so now, since there are 300 million people who make up America the beautiful.

The 300 million mark was estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau, using birth, death and international migrant rates per second. The U.S. surpassed the 200 million on a census clock in 1967. At that time, individuals in the lobby of the Commerce Department and President Lyndon B. Johnson couldn’t hold back a celebratory speech. Some decades later, 300 million doesn’t seem to be having the same response.

“When we hit 100 million, it was a celebration of America’s might in the world,” says Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California. “When we hit 200 million, we were solidifying our position. But at 300 million, we are beginning to be crushed under the weight of our own quality of life degradation.”

A possible reason for the anxiety may be that U.S. population growth has increased by immigrants and their children, which worries some American natives and makes politicians a bit agitated. Immigrants represent about 40 percent of the population growth. This is an important reason for the increase in population and overabundance of births over deaths. The rate in the U.S. is significantly higher compared with Europe or Japan.

Since population has been doubled since 1950, questions rise as to what affects the rapidly multiplying demographic will have. A few may include more rules against growth, more protests against anti-growth rules, more traffic, more oil consumption, and more greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. In addition to a strain of water supply in the Southwest. Still, many believe it is heedless to let nerves run about the 300 million marker.

“Immigration-led growth signals the attractiveness of the American economy and polity,” says Kenneth Prewitt, a former head of the Census Bureau and now professor of public affairs at Columbia University. 

The recent news of population growth doesn’t seem to faze University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee demographic economics professor, Scott Drewianka.

“There’s nothing magical about the number 300 million. The U.S. population has been growing fairly slowly over the past couple decades [around 1 percent per year], so it’s only a small change over last year or the year before.” Drewianka said. “Also, the U.S. fertility rate is right around the ‘replacement level,’ so the population growth we do have is essentially entirely due to one: our increasing life spans and two: immigration.”

Life spans have jumped from 55 years in 1915, to 71 years in 1967, to 78 years now. From 1915 to 2006, the percentage of the adult population with a high school diploma has leaped from 14 to 85 percent, and homeownership has increased from 46 to 69 percent.

Article Tools